The question for the evening was how to train if you are on your own. After a monumental struggle with my phone and my tablet involving downloading an extra app, trying to copy and paste where Android decided you don’t copy and paste…… all just to find an email address that should be in my contacts list anyway…. I’m ready to chuck all of this back in the bin and go it alone.
But that’s not quite what the question implied, it was how does one train budo on one’s own. Granted, sensei are usually at least as annoying as these “smart devices” and about as smart, so I can see wanting to train without one. I certainly would like to be without that portable email device.
But you can’t train alone in the martial arts. You have to learn this stuff somewhere, either in person or through books and videos. In no case can you learn budo without having another person provide instruction to you. You can make stuff up but that’s not budo. Or at least not what we consider budo to be. Budo is a lineage, not a “way of fighting” and you can’t be a lineage of one generation in length.
Let’s get to the usual question. I’ve learned this stuff from someone and now I no longer have access to him. What do I do? First, you practice what you know. This is pretty obvious, or should be. If you don’t practice what you know you won’t retain it, in fact you’ll lose it. So practice every day, or whenever you usually practice.
Next, if your sensei is still alive (one of the most common ways to be alone in your practice is to have a sensei die) then visit whenever you can to get checked and to learn a bit more. If you are a long distance student to begin with you might get a “data dump” of information in a very short time. Write it down or lose it.
I remember speaking with students who spent years in Japan learning an art who would watch other foreigners come for a week and get ten times the information they got in a year. Didn’t seem fair but it is two different situations. You want a lot of stuff in a very short time? Visit once a year for a week, get the shape of a whole bunch of stuff and then hope you can remember it. You want to learn this stuff in depth… but slowly? Go to class two or three times a week.
If your sensei is alive and not available for short visits maybe he’s available to answer a letter (those were like emails but using pen and paper and the post office… sort of a UPS for paper and pen packages). Or today, maybe you can irritate him as much as he irritated you by buying him a smart device so you can communicate with him.
It’s truly not hard to contact people any more, unless there is a language barrier and then it’s as hard as it always was. I know folks who use video chat programs to do remote classes. It would work quite well I suspect. I have got to the point of making videos to send to people in order to answer questions, haven’t quite got to the video lesson thing yet.
And if you no longer have a sensei?
Find another one, that’s allowed when your teacher dies. If you are young and half trained it’s more or less expected for you to do that. If your organization is large and you are in the heirarchy, a lineage of some type, you would be expected, even if fully trained, to fit yourself into that heirarchy somewhere. Nobody likes a loose cannon rolling around on deck.
Not practical to find another teacher?
Books, your notes, another, similar art, a lot of thinking, a lot of practicing and setting yourself questions that you must answer by looking deeper within your own art.
Teach. I mean it, students ask the dumbest questions, the ones that are so dumb you’ve never thought of them, and now you have to think about them in order to answer them. Maybe you teach yourself at this time. Just in case you say something interesting, listen to yourself as you answer.
If you just can’t do any of that, if it’s just too hard and too depressing to work on the stuff on your own and you don’t have a sensei any more…. “tsk tsk, that’s a shame, too bad” (etc. etc.)
Not trying to fix something you don’t want fixed, but it’s OK to stop practicing. You have, in all likelihood learned lots already.
Seito Bugei Juku 